Classified ad of the week: Dodge Monaco

We've found the perfect land-yacht for a trip to the Grand Prix…

If Obi Wan was a petrolhead, he would have felt a great disturbance in the force when news of the Dodge Monaco landed. Not because it's a particularly bad car - it was the manufacturer's top-of-the-line offering when it launched in 1964, and featured fripperies like its very own rear lights and grill and sportyish interior.

But it was called Monaco. A full-size American car with wood on the side was named after a fiendishly tight, winding Formula 1 circuit. The same sort of full-size American car that handles like a dream. A dream about a really bad-handling car. A nightmare, if you will. And the same sort of Monaco that has the word ‘twisty' running through it like a stick of rock. That's famously, notoriously difficult to get through without smearing yourself up a superyacht, even if you have the finest automotive technology known to humanity.

But there was some good news for Obi. Under the soccer-mum skin it got the Chrysler Corp's littlest elephant gun - the 6.3-litre 270hp V8. In fact, if you bought a Monaco you could spec any engine in the Chrysler line-up, including the big Hemis.

Wagons like this one also got disc brakes as standard, as well as 18 feet of sheet metal from front to back. That afforded it 97 cubic feet of cargo space inside. To give that some real-world perspective, there's enough room in there for 1647 2-litre bottles of Coke. And a race weekend's worth of snacks and chums.

This one's a fresh California import too, and its mintyness suggests it'll be fighting fit for the journey from the dealers in Germany to Monaco, just in time for the Big Prize this weekend. And it'll only set you back a piffling £11,930.